1. "Let's welcome our new Transfer student!"
The Alien/Robot/Space Princess from the future just HAS to enroll in Our Hero's school, and go to his class, and embarrasses the living shit out of him with her introduction. SO sick of this. Clockwork Planet just pulled this for NO reason.

2. Arena combat.
There is nothing that makes a show grind to a halt faster than suddenly forcing the characters to fight in some kind of staged tournament. Sure, you came up with all kinds of nifty powers, and maybe even theories behind why they work, and oh, of course they have all kinds of wonderful attack names, and I know you, the author, are SO fucking proud of them. But there's no story there. Bleach and Naruto were two of the worst offenders. Bleach, I especially hated your characters referring to incredible, unbeatable special attacks that the characters had somehow both perfected, knew were unbeatable, yet had rarely, or even NEVER pulled out in combat before. Well, yeah, I suppose it's never been beaten if you've never used it....
And Naruto, I pretty much gave up the first time this cliche reared its ugly head in some "Training exercise." But it's hard to tell when it started because Naruto at that point was having more flashbacks than Dr. Timothy Leary. In fact, at one point I swear Naruto was having a flashback to the previous episode where Hinata was having a flashback to her childhood.
Look, there's filler, and then there's fucking sandbagging. Either you have a story to tell or not. Smashing your characters together two by two might be nifty for a showing off aspects of their personalities, but having everyone else on the sidelines infodumping about the action, and rules-lawyering at each other as to why the unbeatable attack that was secret until just now didn't work, it's boring. It's like that embarrassing high school party where you tried to explain D&D to the cute girl who started gnawing off limbs to get away.

There will be more. Unfortunately, but feel free to add your own.

Added 6/3
3. Freaking out over girls.
I sometimes wonder if this is a contributing cause, or a symptom of Japan's low birth rate. But it bugs me that virtually every guy acts like they've never seen a girl before (even though they've been going to school with them for as long as they've been alive), and goes from lusting like a pig in the distance to terrified, quivering lump of jelly when she so much as talks to him (while apparently girls have no such trouble). We've come a long way from Ataru Moroboshi....

Posted by: Mauser at 04:02 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 450 words, total size 3 kb.